I love the fact that Lucas still hasn't been crystal clear about the
whole Darth Sidious/Palpatine issue. Nor has he made it evident how
such a powerful Sith master could deal face-to-face with the
greatest Jedi of the day without being detected. I think there are
still twists to come here …

Now, George
Lucas is paying for all this, so he gets to call the shots, but that
still hasn't stopped my friend Hoade and I from playing arm chair
quarterbacks and spending days (much to the dismay of his
Significant Other) going over what George should have done.

And guess what? You are now the latest to be subjected to these mad
ramblings. No spoilers here—just a bunch of über fans telling George
how it should have gone down.

Next, cut to the climatic scene when Darth
Vader cuts off Luke's hand and gives the revelation of 1980:
“Luke, I am your father!” To which Luke really starts whining and
in a fit of disbelief jumps off the platform and plummets to the bowels of
Cloud
City to the shock of the entire Star Wars fan base.

Whoa!

And we believed it! That's the amazing part.

Here's Darth Vader. The first time we see him in Star Wars
he walks over, picks up one of the Rebel Scum™ and chokes him to
death. Next scene, he's choking an officer on his own side (it's not made
clear if it's a superior officer or one of equal rank, but still, that is
not a nice thing to do, even if Lord Vader finds his lack of faith
… disturbing). He kills Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi (although this is open to
interpretation). You do not cross this guy. Throughout The
Empire Strikes Back he's promoting Captains as fast as he's killing them
for failure of duty. He has a direct line to the Emperor! You do
not want to work for this guy either.

He also wears black. In our Western culture this, along with
everything else he's done, makes him The Bad Guy. They lie. They cheat.
They play underhanded.

So why would we believe him when he says “Luke, I am your
father!”? What? You mean Ol' Ben lied? Hold on a second … the
supposed Good Guy lies, and the supposed Bad Guy tells the truth?

It is with this that Hoade and I start our divergent histories with George
“Forgive me Howard the Duck!” Lucas.

The first two movies stay the same. Well, almost. Strike the “Star Wars:
A New Hope” Special Edition. It didn't happen. Nope. Not at all. Han
Solo is a cynical bastard that will shoot first to save his own skin
(come on, Greedomissing from point blank?). Okay, so the first two movies stay the
same.

The Return of
the Jedi is something completely different. And I'm not even sure if
all of this can be done in a single film—it'll have to be some
very tight plotting for sure.

Darth Vader is lying. Of course, he's The Bad Guy. But Luke is
conflicted over this—is Darth Vader really his father? Knowledge and
revenge seeking, he goes after Darth Vader and we get that wonderful fight
scene (which, really, was the only good part of “Return of the
Jedi”) with the Emperor edging him on. Luke (like it was prophesied in
one of the films) does kill the Emperor and in doing so, falls to the Dark
Side. Circle complete [S/X—Emperor
laughing].

Meanwhile, this mysterious other mentioned towards the end of “The
Empire Strikes Back?” Who better than Han “Give me a blaster over
this Force mumbo-jumbo” Solo? Who would of thunk it? The cynic turns
believer (even if it might take a bit of the Jedi Mind Trick™ to help
him along) and puts an end to the rather short rule of Darth Vader and Kid
in the last reel (and for pity's sake, there are no Ewoks).

Okay, so there the slight problem of Han being frozen and in the hands of Jabba
the Hutt, but we can leave it to Lando and Chewbacca to get him back
(no, I don't believe that Leia
would be allowed to go on that mission—she's just too important for the
Rebellion for that (although she did look quite nice in that slave outfit,
but still, that's no excuse) and Luke is busy hunting down and falling to
the Dark Side to help). Minor plot point but still, it has to be worked
out.

Okay, maybe it's not as upbeat as it could have been, but Campbellian
heros aren't perfect and they do die eventually so it would still fit the
mold. And it makes for a more dramatic story without Ewoks.

I want the flying cars, damnit! I want the 20 hour work weeks. I want giant
wheel shaped space stations! I want a Gernsbackian future! Is that asking
too much? Especially in the light of barely drivable cars, 80 hour work
weeks (“and you'll like it too, god damn you!”), small soda-can shaped space
station (note! singular!) and a Gibsonian future looming over all of us.

PostcardsFrom is a
labor of love. It has to be—they gave up their jobs for
it. It's a cool site—they make their own postcards from each state in the
U.S. I think they could do well actually selling the postcards.

Even though the Mayor of Inglis,
Floridabanned
Satan from entering the town, I seriously have doubts as to the power
the Mayor has over such supernatual beings. Sure, you might have the major
ingresses covered by such proclamations (according to legend, vampires
cannot enter one's home unless explicitely invited) but does that cover city
limits in their entirety? What about areas not covered by roads?

And given that Satan supposedly lives below, shouldn't she have buried the
proclamations? Okay, so maybe it's a metaphorical below so that might not
work. But still, the whole notion is rather silly. It's the Mayor
for crying out loud—here in the States, we have this bit in the
Constitution separating Church and State.

So Martin [the father] threw himself
into it the way he had thrown himself into glassblowing,
silversmithing, puzzlemaking, and filmmaking, among various other
pursuits. He fired the nanny and came up with a plan: They would
live on $5,000 a year. They would travel by bus, support themselves
with craft shows and the proceeds of the “Erik & Dad Puzzle
Co.,” and attempt to feed themselves on a budget of $1 per meal per
person (a goal Martin admits sheepishly now they did not always
achieve). Martin would work as little as possible.

The father's educational theory went like this: Apart from one hour
of home schooling a day, the child should pursue his own interests.
They spent a few weeks at a commune in Tennessee, a year in
Providence, six months in Chicago. During a three-year stint in
Miami Beach, he sat Erik down with a neighbor to see if he was
interested in learning Chinese; the language instruction went
nowhere, but the neighbor had a computer.

Not only is Erik 20 years old and an assistant professor at MIT but his speciality is in computational
origami (and the link there is an article about Erik solving the problem
of why maps are so hard to fold) which isn't your everyday ordinary
discipline.

I do notice though, that parents that have an interest in their childrens'
education often produce intelligent children, reguardless of formal
education (as this shows).

I find old maps
interesting. For instance, South Florida here used to be one entire
county—Dade with some lovely sounding towns that are for the most part, no
longer around. The upper portion of Dade (from 1895) there to the left
shows such places as Hillsboro (now just a street in Northern Broward),
Hypoluxo (now a street in Palm Beach County), Jewell (which no longer exists
as a town or a street as far as I know) and Progresso (which became Wilton
Manors).

I found these old maps at the Color Landform Atlas of the United
States, which has more modern maps of the United States. I suppose the
webmaster put these scans of an 1985 road atlas on the site, just because.
I probably would have—they're very beautiful.

New space, new Computer Room. At Condo Conner, the Computer Room was a
separate room in which I (and later Spring) stuffed all my (our) computers
in. That was in 1994. Prior to that I had the home computers sharing my
bedroom, and for now, it looks like the Computer Room at the Facility in the
Middle of Nohwere is also the master bedroom as well.

Such is life.

The last work office I actually liked the most was my FAU
office I had in the Math
Department while I was a Computer Science undergrad working for a
professor and graduate student from Complex Systems and Brain Sciences. Yes,
quite the interdisciplinary work experience there and I had pretty much an
entire office to myself (officially, I shared it with two graduate students
who were almost never there). Black board, shelves of reference material, a
fold out bed and a couple of computers all to myself. My only complaint, and
it isn't much of one: no window, so it was easy to loose oneself in time.

I spent a good four years working out of that office, ostensibly part time
(and at one tremendious rate for an undergrad) and loving nearly every
minute of it. Ask me what I did though, and I couldn't tell you—heck, I
didn't fully understand what I was working on there, just that it involved
some heavy math and some light visualization work (one project took over a
year to compute, and three days to transfer the images to video tape).

I had wanted a picture of the U.S. $20 bill. I wanted to scan one (just for
the picture of Andrew Jackson; why I wanted that will have to wait) but
since neither Spring nor I had one, I decided to look
for one on the Internet, so I figured the best place to start would be the
U.S. Treasury.

So I check three items marked under Nuclear Ordnance Equipment and
fortunately it didn't seem like anything was available. Of course,
now my IP address is associated
with checking for the existance of Nuclear Ordnance Equipment so I
guess I can expect a visit by some serious men in business suits and dark
glasses …

Here's why I wanted Andrew Jackson's
picture from the U. S. $20 bill. When the bills were first introduced,
besides thinking they don't look like real money, I felt that the image of
Andrew Jackson looks like that of actor Jeff Conaway, known for
playing Bobby Wheeler on Taxi and Zach Allan on Babylon 5.

When I bring this up, most people are like “Who?” and I'm going “Jeff
Conaway … you know … the dude from Taxi,” and all the time I'm getting
blank stares from people, or the scrunched up face of concentration as they
try to remember this semi-familiar name from a TV show from 20 years ago.

Looks like Kuro5hin
is now doing text ads since their
relationship with OSDN has ended and the response has been good. We'll see
if text ads are the way to go, but
until my readership goes waaaaay up there it's not cost effective
for me to do this.

——you are recieving this message because you responded to a posted
advertisement. if you are recieving this and did not respond to an
advertisement please send an e-mail to m0neyhungry_19@yahoo.com to be
REMOVED———

Dear Friend,
I am looking for 10 people that are willing to dedicate 5-15 hours a
week. I will personally be there, every step of the way, to assist
you on your journey, whether your goals include more free time, more
money in your pocket, or just overall happiness, I would like to
help you.

Blah blah blah. It goes on and I'm not going to waste space here
sending out this person's message of wealth and happiness. So a little bit
of searching, and I find Spam Laws, a site that has all the
current anti-spam legislation currently enacted or being worked on. Quite a
nice site and it allowed me to send the following back to the spammer:

To whom it may concern:

I did not wish to receive this information, nor have I responded to
a posted advertisement from this address. I wish to advise you that
you are fortunate in having sent this email from a facility located
in Indiana, which has no current laws against unsolicited email, to
a facility located in Florida, which has no current laws against
unsolicited email that apply in this case. But a majority of the
states have enacted laws against unsolicited email that make you
liable for criminal prosecution, especially in reguards to forged
headers and routing information:

You have currently forged the email from a user on this system
(whether it is a real account or not is irrelevent—this is plainly
a forged header) which, had I or you been in Arkansas, Colorado,
Connecticut, Delaware, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, Nevada,
North Carolina, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia,
Washington or West Virginia you could have faced criminal charges.
Furthermore, under California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada,
Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Washington, West Virginia or Wisconsin you
may face criminal charges for misleading or mislabeling the email on
the subject line, as you clearly have done above.

On the other hand, if I can prove that your email message was routed
through any network in Iowa you may be liable under Iowa law section
714E.1 subsection 5 but truth be told it may be difficult actually
conduct such a case, but it is possible.

I do request that you remove the email address “sean@conman.org”
from your list as I do not wish to receive any futher unsolicited
email from you.

Fortunately, I awoke in time to catch my roommate Rob and friends Shane and Kim going to lunch (or dinner, depending upon
your viewpoint). We ended up eating at the Boca-Glades Gourmet Diner, just
up the street (well, two miles up the street) from the Facility in the
Middle of Nowhere. It's easy enough to miss unless you look closely,
nestled as it is just next to the Florida Turnpike exit on Glades Road and
dispite the name, it isn't a diner (critieria #1: it's not open 24
hours. Bummer. Criteria #2: Rob won't eat at diners).

The inside is upscale, yet the prices are very reasonable and the
food—well, it's very good. Everything (including the bread,
the hummus dip, the desserts) is home made, and much to Rob's delight, they
have a wonderful selection of beers and aren't afraid to serve them for
breakfast (he checked—he gets off from work around 8:00 am) nor are they
afraid of serving huge it in pint sized glasses either.

And the service was wonderful; we all pretty much fell in love with the
waitress—cute, smart and funny. Can't beat that at all.

I've spent the past week or so adding a new feature to The Boston Diaries
and I'm finally rolling it out—email notification of updates!

A week for a simple feature might seem like overkill, but I did want to do
this right and with as little breakage as possible. And it's not quite as
straight forward as you may think either.

Design strategy number one: avoid complaints of spam as much as possible.
As a result, I added a verification scheme. Upon first submitting an email
address, the program displays a page saying the email address has been
collected and at the same time, an email has been sent to the email address
requesting verification. This is to keep a malicious person from submitting
an email address to some unsuspecting person who then starts receiving
emails about some oddball site being updated. So simply adding an email
address to the end of a list is right out.

To this end, there are two lists maintained—one list of addresses that I
am waiting a reply from, and the second one that actually gets sent the
notifications of updates.

When the person subscribing replies, the reply email is sent to a program
that gets the email address that doing the replying, and looks it up in the
pending list, and if so, removes it from the pending list and adds the email
to the notification list, and sends an email saying as much.

The program that processes new entries then goes sequentially through the
notification list and sends out an email message.

Fairly straightforward, although there are some details I skimped out on
(like checks to see if the address is already in one of the lists,
unsubscribing, just small details) that's pretty much how it works. The
time spent though, was making sure I got all the details (big and
small) right. Oh, and making it such that Spring could use it for her journal as
well.

I've yet to hear back from the
spammer, which isn't all that surprising; I doubt I'll ever hear from
him. Bummer.

In other news, I've received several pieces of spam from what looks to be
Microsoft, but is, in fact, yet another piece of viral
software attempting to propagate itself across the internet via
Microsoft Windows.

What made this hunt so hard? Puzzles like the 192-letter cryptogram,
for one thing. As Jean notes, “A cipher of that length should be a
snap to break. And this one wouldn't have been bad at all if I'd
thought to mention that the hidden message was in Spanish. But I
didn't. I also neglected to note that the pairs 'll', 'rr,' and 'ch'
stood for single letters, as they do in the Spanish alphabet.”
Chalk up some frustrated victims for this ruse, particularly the
people on the Spanish House team, who were among the last to figure
out the trick.

So there we were, Bill, Dave and I, driving along this lone stretch of road
looking dilligently for the next clue and not finding it at all. We
eventually went back to the previous point in the treasure hunt,
and carefully traced the clue back to that same lone stretch of highway.
This time we found the clue but were the last team to do so.

It turns out that we had solved the puzzle too quickly and the person
handing out the clue didn't arrive in time.

I think we ended up coming in second or third place.

And I never was on a winning scavenger hunt team. Not that we didn't have
fun while doing it.

Sasha McNeal, one of the show's writers and puppeteers, admits that
it takes a twisted mind to dream up the idea of performing
“Showgirls” with sock puppets, let alone pull it off. But once the
idea had been broached, the group couldn't ignore its comedic
potential. “I think that as actors we find it amusing because (the
movie) is just so bad,” she says. “And you can get away with so
much more with sock puppets. If it were just ourselves redoing
'Showgirls,' no one would care.”

Rob and I were
talking about unemployment the other day. I had remarked that economists
(or business leaders, or both) had said that there is a minimum amount of
unemployment that is needed to keep the economy working. At the time, we
both theorized that it was the level required to keep those employed in line
(the Cynical/Conspriatorial Theory).

The article above (mediumish length, but worth it) goes into detail about
how this minimum level of unemployment to sustain our economy comes (or
came) about. It's less a conspriacy and more a way companies find the
maximum profit given the rules of the game.

Several weeks ago someone asked if it would be possible for people to leave
comments here, a feature that a log of online journals/weblogs have (such as
Live Journal). I
took it under consideration, and even wrote a long entry about it that I
never got around to posting since it was long and rather dry.

In a nutshell, I talked about the problems I had in integrating it into the
format I use here—not actual storage problems, but referencing problems.
As I have it now, you can select arbitrary portions of my journal (c.f. The Electric King
James Bible) I never thought of ways to exclude content from the range.
And therein is the crux of the problem—I don't necessarily want to always
print the comments for an entry, but it should be easy to view them and, as
always, get ranges of comments.

I also have a bias—I hate threaded web discussion boards (the
best example of what I dislike: Slashdot. I always read the comments in
“flat mode”—all comments visible (and on Slashdot, at a fairly high
rating level but that's Slashdot and I'm digressing). I think what I
dislike about them is the ping-ponging you ahve to do going down and up the
thread chain following comments (Scripting News' commentary system is
particularly bad in that reguard). But like I said, that's a bias
I have and I don't want to needlessly exclude people's preferences
in reading habits if I can avoid it.

But just now, via Blogger (I occasionally get curious as to
what the competion is doing), I came across BlgKomm, a commentary system that
has a unique feature—“[c]omments
appear within your blog, below the posts, with any popups.”

I try it out, and yes, it is rather interesting—the comments are initially
hidden until you select a link, then they're flushed out for that post only.
Now granted, that's a display issue and not a referening issue, but it still
is something for me to think about.

I set the 12-pack of Coca-Cola on its side on the counter to open
it and grab a can. I peeled open the outer flap. Then the inner flap.
Then cans started rolling out of the cardboard box, bouncing off the recycle
bin and onto the kitchen floor, banging and clanging, some cans threatening
to burst.

After much discussion, Spring and I decided to move two of the
smaller shelves back downstairs, freeing up more room in the master bedroom.
Rob and I
managed to move the units downstairs and I then had the daunting task of
moving endless stacks of books downstairs (after spending the energy moving
them up stairs in the first place).

Now, before moving the units, I removed what shelves I could, to make it
lighter and as they lay on the bed, I had a thought: if I have to carry
both books and shelves down the stairs, why not load up each shelf with
books? They're paper backs, so it's not like they'll weigh it down an
intollerable amount. I mean, the books where on the shelves to begin with.

So I loaded up a shelf with six stacks of paperbacks and carried it down the
stairs, feeling much like the chef from Sesame Street who would have a handful
of creme pies and start walking down a set of stairs. So there I was, “Six
stacks of books,” I said in a loud booming voice as I carried them down the
flight of stairs.

Six times I did that, and each time I felt like that chef. Only I managed
not to trip and spill any books (or creme pies) on myself.

The Good Things The entry that Wil Wheaton stars in. A poingant
tail of a toll booth worker trying to find meaning and direction in his life
on the day his ex-girlfriend (and it's never made real clear who dumped
whom) is getting married.

The Etiquette Man The ending is weak on this one (yea, right, like
that would ever happen) but watching Steve Coulter's The Etiquette
Man is just gosh darn swell. Right from a 50s educational film on dating.

Indefinitely A film just as good as The Good Things. I
really got into the story of a videographer who falls in love with a bride
to be. My only real complaint about this one is just as I'm getting into
the whole story it. End. Stop. Fini.

Wait! What about the impending marriage? Does the videographer stop the
wedding? Does the bride to be drop her jerk of a fiancé? I want
more!

The Parlor Talk about your sureal films. A group of people sitting
in a waiting room having the wildest conversations and nobody appears to be
who they say they are (a old guy claiming to be a 13 year old girl named
Beth?). Spring clues in on the setup before I do, but I did manage to guess
the ending.

Tower of Babble This one is high concept—two billion monkeys at
two billion typewriters writing the dialog to our lives. We have three
completely different stories going on, each with the same sequences of
dialog. It works, and yes, the three story lines to intersect at the very
end.

Spring and I are
eating dinner at the Starlite Diner and the motif is a
50s/early 60s. On the wall next to us is a framed article about James
Garner and the TV show Maverick.
Seeing that reminded me of a theory I have.

“Did I ever tell you about my TV Detective/Police Show Theory?” I asked
Spring.

“Umm … ” said Spring, face scrunching up. “I don't think so.”

“It goes like this: Any television detective or police show will always
look like it was filmed in the 70s.”

Mark has been
suggesting that I download and install Mozilla for Windows for some time now.
I've never gotten around to doing it but tonight, I check Rob'sLiveJournal and he
mentions that the Mozilla just released Mozilla 0.9.9 and that
it works flawlessly.

Okay, might as well try it.

I must say I'm impressed.

I'm even more impressed that they seem to actually use the
<LINK> tags in the page. Oh my … I've been
adding those tags to my pages for years (at least from '97 or '98)
and now they might actually be useful.

So far, the only browser that I've seen use those tags has been Lynx, the infamous text
based browser. Now it seems they've added support for the
<LINK> tag in Mozilla.

But while that is nice, Lynx will use all the tags I've defined, while
Mozilla seems to only use a subset. But it's a start.

I just found out that Mozilla
supports the <LINK> tag, but to actually enable it, you need
to select “View/Show-Hide/Site Navigation Bar” from the main menu. Now
maybe more sites will use the <LINK> tags.

My colocation half drops off the face of the earth. I can still
ping it; I
can traceroute to it, but any higher form of connection (TCP connections for example)
just hang.

So the kernel is still running, not the userland stuff.

So I make plans on driving down to Ft. Lauderdale where the colocation
facility I use is located. Now, last I heard, you are supposed to call down
there to let them know you coming and since it's about midnight when
tower (the machine in question) stopped responding, I can
understand that. But Spring (who I have to pick up from work
at 12:30 am) has a call phone; we can call as we drive down there.

Before I leave, Mark calls. He thinks it's a
network problem at the facility. And he does have a point:

And traceroutes also show some anomalies (note: Mark uses OpenBSD and its
ping prints double ping packets. The one for Linux (which is what
I use) doesn't. But traceroute under both show anomalies). So he
does have a point. I call down there and with some minor hassle, get a
trouble ticket submitted.

Now, here is where I digress a bit. One of my friends and clients colocates
a server down there and
since Mark and I do work for him (more in the past, still do stuff for him
now) and since he doesn't use all his alloted bandwidth, he allowed us to
place tower down there along with his. So it's really his
account. Which is why I had a bit of a hassle getting a trouble ticket
submitted (Server id? Server password? I have to submit a trouble
ticket via the website? What?).

I go pick up Spring, and talk to Rob who works nights there about
the problem and we both agreed it sounded more like a downed server than a
network problem (although there are network problems). I'm not going
through the problem I had last time
and want to drive down there and reboot it myself. Spring didn't
have a problem with that, although she didn't have her cell phone with her
so we couldn't call ahead.

Oh well. We'll deal with getting in when we get there.

Half an hour later, I'm buzzing and knocking on the door. They're asking me
questions from inside (which I can barely hear) and I'm shouting answers
back to them (which they can barely hear). They finally open the door and
let me in.

“You're supposed to fill out an On-Site Request Form on our webpage,” said
the technician. “Then it'll be approved within two hours.”

“I wasn't aware of that,” I said. What I was thinking was, Two XXXXXXX hours? My server is down and I have to wait two
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX hours to be approved?
What's up with that?

“But you're supposed to fill out an On-Site Request Form and be approved,”
said the technician. More bantering between the two of us. “Okay, let me
get you a form to fill out.” He goes off. Spring and I sit down and wait.

Where Spring works, colocation customers have 24 hour access to their boxes
and they don't have to fill out “On-Site Request Forms.” When I worked
for the ISP we had
colocation customers with 24 hour access and no “On-Site Request Forms” to
fill out.

I can see perhaps calling ahead to inform them you are on the way. I
cannot see filling out a form and waiting two hours for approval, especially
since we live over half an hour away (by car), even more so because the
server is down and a two hour (minimum) outtage is bad.

The technician wanders back in, hands me the forms, and disappears again.

I fill out the forms. I'm not requesting adding or removing equipment
(which can only be done between regular business hours by the way)—just
checking out a server.

Then we wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Hold on a sec—no. Wait.

Finally I am allowed back into the server room. Spring stays
behind in the lobby, not wanting to further complicate things. The
technician leads me through the maze of racks to my server and hooks up a
monitor and keyboard (which are on a crash cart) to it. I then get to work.

Yup. Run-a-way process sucking up all memory and not even a
Ctrl-Alt-Del will bring this Linux system down (I'm able to check
memory usage with Shift-ScrollLock and processes with
Ctrl-ScrollLock). Power cycle. I thought I could skip the rather
expensive fsck of the 17G harddrive by booting into single user
mode, but alas, I was wrong (I had wanted to remove any possibility of the
offending program from running). I
debate about waiting around for it to finish (about half an hour) but decide
against that. I manage to reboot it, this time normally and leave.

Now, what I should have done is told one of the technicians there
to let the system run because it takes about 30-40 minutes for it to check
the disk. But there were no technicians around and I had my fill of the
place for the night.

Spring and I leave. On the way home we stop and get a bite to eat. It's
almost 4:00 am we're back home and towerstill isn't back
up. What the …

I check the trouble ticket—as per their policy, the machine wasn't
responding to any of their monitoring software so of course they rebooted
it. Aarhglghlghahhhhhhhhhhhalg! The time of the last comment was
about 3:40 am so tower should be nearly finished rebooting. I
starting pinging and as soon as I get a response I start logging in
and removing the ofending program and check the system out.

Now, I had rebooted the machine twice. They ended up rebooting it
four times.

Sigh.

My guess is that they're used to customers who don't manage their own
servers and leave that stuff up to them. Not bad in and of itself but it
certainly isn't what I expect and having to deal with their rules is a bit
grating, but I really can't beat the price right now.

A friend of mine (who for now wishes to remain anonymous) is interested in blogging and I said I
would set him up with my system. So I create a site for him, copy over my
existing template, modify the configuration for him, etc., etc. I then send
in (via email) the first post to see if things work.

Well, that's where things didn't work.

The post itself was accepted and stored correctly.

Small digression: The Boston Diaries is primarily dynamic. You type in
something like http://boston.conman.org/2002/3/4 and that page is
generated on the fly. I change the template, the effect takes place
immediately. However, the main page, the one you get by going to
http://boston.conman.org/ is not dyamic—it's
actually a static page recreated whenever a new entry is posted. It doesn't
have to be, but I figure that since this page is probably going to be loaded
most often I might as well cache a static copy to keep the system load down.

So, part of the process of accepting and storing an entry is the generation
of the main page. Normally, it works fine. But not in this case.

Another small digression: the configuration file for mod_blog
needs the starting date of the blog. There are cases where I need this
information and instead of wasting a lot of time going backwards from now
finding the first entry, again, it's cached information.

I had thought that I may have made a mistake in the starting date. No, I
got the starting date correct. What I didn't get correct was handling the
situation when a blog is actually started.

When writing the software, I had already been keeping entries. In fact, I
think I had a month or so
worth
of entries when I started the code two years ago. And I was so focused on
getting the URL
processing correct, that I neglected to test some border cases. And I never
got around to testing those cases since they didn't affect me.

Until now.

Oops.

Problems I found:

Not handling the case when there are no entries.

Not handling the case when there are fewer than X days worth of
entries (where X is the number of days to display on the main page).

Not handling the case when there are fewer than 15 entries
(note—not the same thing as having 15 days worth of entries, and
this is for the RSS file).

And one or two cases of not checking to see if you've past the
first entry or most current entry.

Cases I should have handled (and tested for!) but neglected.

I do need to really go through the code and clean it up.

The problem I had was that I'm a bit too close to the code. I'm working
towards a specific goal (new method of document storage retrieval and
reference) and as such, the software is experimental and the
problems I'm focusing on meant I missed some reliability details elsewhere,
since hey, it works in my case.

And while some people have probably grabbed the software I doubt many, if
any, are actually using the software since I'm not getting
any feedback on the code itself. Okay, you do have to hunt around
to find the link to the source
code but it has been downloaded. And I'm sure it being written in C
makes it all that much more popular.

But little did I expect software I wrote to crash a Unix server.
The last time I saw userland software (an application) crash a Unix server
was … oh … eight years ago I
think.

I spent some time yesturday playing with Grey Matter, which seems to be
one of the more popular blogging software packages out there. I downloaded
it, partly out of curiosity and partly for a project I'm working on (and
yes, I'm scoping out the competition).

Now, I can see why Grey Matter is popular: it installs very easily (I had
it running in a few minutes), is template driven (so the output can look
exactly like you want it to) and … it's in Perl.

Which means—if the web server allows CGI, you can run Grey Matter. There
is no compiling. Just stick it in, make sure the location of Perl in the
scripts is correct, and go.

I think that reason alone, is why Perl is pretty much used
everywhere on the World Wide Web.

Now, my software that runs this site
is in C. One, I can't stand Perl. Never had. And thankfully, I've never
had to maintain Perl code either. Two, tower (the server that runs
this site) is a 486. A 33MHz 486. By today's standards the machine
shouldn't be running, much less running a website. You can't even
give 486 based machines away, which is sad, since they work. This
site is proof. But anyway, this machine is slow, and running a blog written
in Perl would be torture indeed.

Like Grey Matter. I'm doing my testing of it on a 120MHz machine and Grey
Matter is SSS-LLL-OOO-WWW. Not quite painfully slow (painfully slow would
be running it on tower) but too slow to be used by more than a few
people on my local box here.

Eight years ago. I get into my office and I notice that pineal, the SGI box I use, has crashed. Hard.
The kernel crashed.

For a Unix system, that's bad.

Not knowing what happened, I bring the box back up and go about my business.

A few days later, it's crashed again.

This time though, I have a slight clue as to what might be going on. I had
noticed one of the users of the box doing some odd things. Normally, I
wouldn't care (seeing how this user was odd to begin with) but I couldn't
help thinking that the odd thing this user was doing might have caused the
machine to crash.

I, suspecting what happened, bring the box back up and go about my business.

A few days later, it's crashed again.

I bring it back up, get the odd user in question, and asked him to do what
he was doing just prior to the crash, exactly.

I watch as the machine crashes.

Now, I still don't know why it crashed, but at least I knew
what caused it to crash. It seems that the user in question logged
in and ran a program called screen.screen is a program
that allows you to have multiple command lines via a single login session
(like a single terminal) and it would keep the session alive if you
disconnected (heck, I used that program myself for those two reasons).
Then, he would log into IRC
and have his IRC client log a
channel to a file. He would then disconnect, leaving the IRC client running (because of
screen) and logging a channel to a file. Doing both of those
things would cause the system to crash.

Odd. Then again, he was an odd user.

So I basically banned the use of IRC on my box. He was the only user who used IRC and he had access to other systems
with it, so it wasn't that big of a loss.

All have a provision similar to that of Maine's section 716: “The
directors and officers of a corporation shall exercise their powers
and discharge their duties with a view to the interest of the
corporation and of the shareholders.”

These laws make it the legal duty of corporate directors and
executives to maximize profits for shareholders.

Robert Hinkley would add a simple amendment: “… but not at the
expense of the environment, human rights, the public safety, the
communities in which the corporation operates, or the dignity of
employees.”

Interesting concept. The customers of a public company are not the
ones that buy their product. No, the true customers are the shareholders,
and if the shareholders feel the public company they hold stock in is not
fullfilling their fudicial duties to increase shareholder value, then that
public corporation can face a series of very expensive lawsuits against it.

This, plus numerous other articles I've read over the past few weeks makes
me think that a large corporate backlash (on a global scale) is forming.
Will anything happen of it? I don't know—the Luddites didn't stop the
Industrial Revolution, and the Inquisition certainly didn't stop the
powershift away from the Catholic Church.

I do know that we are still in the process of a major power shift from
nationalism to corporatism and that it won't be over any time soon (the
shift from religious to nationalism took several centuries to resolve. The
beginnings of the corporate shift didn't start until the religious to
nationalism shift was well underway (I'm placing the start of the
corporatism shift around the 1600s with the formation of the British East
India Company) so I don't expect to see the next shift (away from
corporatism) any time soon.

WASHINGTON, DC—In a closely watched proceeding, DC District Court
Judge Natalia Wimbley ruled Friday in favor of claims by a coalition
of media companies to rights to the 'attention' of consumers. “This
ruling is crucial to the continued vitality of American art and
culture,” explains RIAA President-elect Richard Mound.
“Recognition of attention rights goes a long way to guaranteeing
that artists and musicians will have access to sustainable revenue
streams.”

I wander downstairs to find Spring channel surfing. I sit down
next to her as she's flipping through channels when she stops on i-channel.

“Oh, cool!” she says. They're playing Arabic music videos in a countdown
type program (we caught the program at #15 in what I think was a top 20
countdown) and I was amazed. I was expecting any women in the videos to be
at least wearing some form of headcovering, but no. In the fifteen videos
we watched, all of them had women with no head covering (okay, there were
one or two where the women wore some form of traditional head covering, but
only for a part of the video). I found that amazing.

I also found the women quite hot but again, these are music videos—the
women are supposed to be hot (or cute, which they were as well).

I'm not saying that all the videos were good. Not at all—some
were quite bad I felt, but it was still interesting to watch them as some of
them had rather jarring cross-cultural moments to them; an Arabic pop song
segues into American rap (with obligatory African-American), another one
segues from traditional Arabic dance (with women fully hidden behind form
fitting outfits) into American country with boots, jeans and cowboy hats
(including the women).

Fascinating.

Turn down the sound on most of them, and you would think you were watching
videos from VH-1, or maybe from Spain, at least Europe.

The British East India Company (charted on Dec. 31, 1600, you hit
that part exactly right) was the first of the proto-corporations
that were organized to expedite the great trading and exploration
voyages.

(Parenthetical note, this was only made possible, or it might be
better to say useful or desirable, by the defeat of the Spanish
Armada in 1588—prior to that the Spanish and the Portugese had a
deathgrip on the spice trade.)

Prior to this new type of organization, with the creation of a
fictitious persona, the corporation, any investor would have been
personally liable for any losses of the venture, to the entire
extent of his personal assets.

The release from personal liability afforded made it much
more easy to organize and finance these extremely risky operations.

Now, with that out of the way, I will take a bit of an issue with
your placement of the date of transition from nationalism to
corporatism, for the following reasons:

First, if one would like to argue this date marked the first
appearance of limited liability fictive entities, that would be
incorrect. The early Middle Ages saw the first of these, in the form
of towns, universities and religious orders. Later, the principle
included guilds. This was established in English common law by the
14th century.

The other way to argue this would be to mention that this saw the
first application of the concept to private enterprise and for
profit entities, that is technically correct. However, charters for
these enterprises were for purposes only seen by the granting
government as in it's national(istic) interests. They were private
tools of public policy.

It was not until after the onery American colonists revolted after
1776 was there support for enterprises unrelated to the direct
public interest. (Alexander Hamilton was an early champion of the
idea) Still by 1800, well over 95% of all the corporations chartered
in the States were for purposes of thngs like building and operating
bridges, roads, canals, and other public service tasks.

Finally, in 1811, New York enacted legislation that enabled
corporations to be charted with nothing much more than a statement
of the intended purposes of the business. Many of the other states
took until the 1850's to do so. England did in 1825, and the other
European countries followed soon after.

So, based on this, I would argue that the first part of the
19th century is the earliest time that can be considered
the birth of an independent corporation. If I were forced
to pick the point at which the transition to a corporate state
began, I would argue that it happened immediately after the Civil
War. The urgencies of the war required consolidation of the
railroads, setting the stage for the first real national
super-corporations with the wealth and power to influence
politicians, and therefore public policy, an exact reversal of the
status of the British East India Company.

If we go along those thoughts then, perhaps the start of the corporate state
can be traced back to May 10th, 1886 with Santa Clara
County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company where corporations could be
considered a “fictional person” under the Fourteenth Amendment of the
Constitution:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United
States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall
make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due
process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws.

If someone has not already done so, allow me to posit Scalzi's
Law of Online Communication: Anything bad you ever write
about someone online will get back to them sooner or later.
People who don't believe this law are by all means invited to prove
me wrong. Note that this invitation comes with the explicit warning
that if you write me something that says “I called my
mom/dad/co-worker/whatever a hideous gasbag on my Web site five
years ago and s/he doesn't know,” I'll merely forward the note
to them with my compliments—Scalzi's Law works because a)
people can't not tell other people about their online exploits and
b) other people can't not tell about your online exploits,
either. If you don't want people to know what you really think about
them, don't put it online. Ever. Really, it's just that simple.

I don't have much to add to that, other than it can happen in the print
world as well. Surprisingly so.

I learned this the hard way.

It was 1987. I had just started a humor column
for the college
newspaper and I had just written a screed against my high school English
teachers (no, it's not online and for good reason. Heck, the editor should
have axed that column but it still ran. It wasn't until a semester or two
later did I get an editor who actually edited and told me a few of
my columns were not fit to print and for that I'm thankful).

Of all my columns I wrote (and I wrote the column for three years)
that was the only one to get back to my high school. And
boy did I hear about it. I felt bad then; I still felt bad ten
years later at my high school reunion (and felt relieved that none of the
teachers I wrote about showed up) and I still feel bad about it now, but the
paper itself is long gone and I doubt if you can even dig up back copies at
the library so that particular piece of journalism is long dead and buried.

Now, mod_blog also recreates some files whenever a new entry is
made, but it's not quite as bad as Grey Matter or Moveable Type from what I
understand. Three files are created—the first is the main page and that
is for speed reasons, as that page is most likely to be loaded. It doesn't
have to be made—it could be generated dynamically when requested
(in fact, that's how I was doing it originally). The second file is the RSS
file, and while it too could be generated dynamically, again for speed
reasons I build a pre-cached version if you will. The third file is a
recent addition and it's the Mozilla/Netscape Sidebar page and
again, like the other two, could be generated dynamically, but for speed
reasons …

Now the posting speed is another issue. Having used the Grey Matter
interface, yes, that is a bit slow to respond since there is a lot of file
building going on. Radioappears to respond faster, but that's because it spawns a
background task to do the file rebuilding; it doesn't pause the interface
until it's done. mod_blog, on the other hand, is different. The
email interface responds quickly, since the email client will batch it up
for sending, then the server will batch it up for sending and finally it'll
arrive and be processed, so via email, the process seems instantaneous,
although it may take a minute or two for everything to be processed.

The web interface is fast—less than a minute and that includes the three
files being created, plus sending notification to Weblogs.com and sending the email
notification (granted, there are only a few people signed up for that right
now, but if it becomes an issue I can spawn a background task to send the
email).

This on a 33 MHz 486 (and yes, the
software is in C but what processing is done, it might be a tad slower in
Perl—not entirely sure).

Archiving—that's a non-issue with mod_blog. The whole site here
is dynamic (well, except for three pre-generated pages) and the concept of
building archive pages just doesn't apply. Granted, I have control over the
server so I can do that, but not everyone has such access. Different tools
for different needs.

I read The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
years ago and found it a bit over the top. It's the future and advertising
dominates the average person's life. Everything is advertising. Even using
Calgon in your bath
wouldn't take you away from the advertising. So shut up and drink your Pepsi.

A bit later (but still a few years ago) I sat down and watched Network, a film
about an over the top news program. In 1976 it must have seemed the top,
but in the mid-90s? It's hard to top Jeraldo Rivera (although Rick
Sanchez, a former local talking head could give Jeraldo a run for his
money) these days, and Network seems rather tame.

So this comes as no surprise:

Acclaim Entertainment said yesterday that it would pay relatives of
the recently bereaved in return for placing small billboards on
headstones, and that the offer might “particularly interest poorer
families.”

Spring has been
looking for a program that will scan the webserver log files for pages
served up by search engines—obstensibly for Disturbing Search Requests.
She hasn't found any, so today I quickly wrote one up for her.

The odd thing I noticed though, as I watched her use the program on her site and my site and my blog is that my blog has way more search requests than
hers does.

In fact, going over the three largest sites on this server (www.springdew.com, www.conman.org and boston.conman.org) that my blog/online journal
here averages about twice the search requests as the other sites.
I think that has something to do with the way this site works. Google (just
to pick a search engine) will have indexed the same entry about five
times—once on main page, once for day, once for the month, once for the year (don't want to bog down the
server needlessly for that example) and once for itself.

I'm not sure how much that affects the final ranking of a particular page
since they're all intrasite links but it does have to skew the results
somehow. Somehow it feels like I'm GoogleBombing
my own site with my own site.

One of my readers reported a usability problem with my site: he couldn't
see one of the links since I was using a rather dark blue to denote
unvisited links and he couldn't see distinguish it from the black text (and
I suppose, he had turned off underlining on links).

He also said that the typical color for unvisited links should be red, or
some other visually outstanding color, to draw attention to them for the
reader. My original idea was to have the visually outstanding color for
links visited since you, the reader, found the link worthy of visiting.

But, given the visual problems mentioned above, I decided to switch the two
colors so now unvisited links will be inviting you to click on them in red,
while those tired, old, visited links will now be in blue.

Now, while I'm talking about linking colors, I'm not sure how many of you
may have noticed, but the brightness of the links is an indication of how
“far” the link is—the brighter it is, the “closer” it is serverwise.
That is, the brightest links are to links to other entries in my journal
here, while the dimmest links are completely external to my site.

Of course, you can only see it if your browser supports style sheets. And
speaking of style sheets … I was expecting to have to fix about a dozen
pages to fix the color aspects of the links, but for some reason it slipped
my mind that I'm using a style sheet and that all that
information about link color is stored in one location so it
only took me like fifteen seconds to fix every page here (or
rather, on The Boston Diaries—my main home page doesn't
use style sheets, so there, I have to fix about a hundred pages).

They all had the SAME message. It was a woman's voice, and she
started the message with a distinctive “Ya know”. In the upcoming
days of phone number investigation, I heard this message dozens of
times. The next one was a wrong number, the sixth number was the
“ya know” message. The seventh number had a different message, but
it had some aspects of the first message, “20-year industry
leader” and “tap into mail-order”. This message, too, was an
effort to send me a 14-page booklet.

Well. I was stunned. These signs were all over town, in scores of
different designs, and they were all the work of one company. A
super-secret Fortune 500 company that never put it's name of it's
ugly ever-present signs.

Cam's “amateur Internet sleuthing” comment notwithstanding, this is an
excellent piece of journalistic reporting. I've seen the signs here in
Lower Sheol as well and have been mildly curious to look into these “work
from home” businesses. But the cynincal side of me (or rather, my cynical
side channeling my Dad's cynical side) goes: “If you can make tons of
money working from home, why promote competition?”

A similar question pops up whenever I see an infomercial hawking money
making schemes (“Buy New York City with other people's
money!”)—“If you can make money doing that, why tell other
people?” It seems to me that there are three reasons why anyone would
do this:

The person found a good way of making money and wishes to help
other people realize their goals in life by making tons of money
(and if so, then why are they selling it as opposed to just
giving the information away? (assuming they made enough
money to satisfy themselves)).

There's more money to be made in telling people how to
make money using [insert system being sold here] than in actually
using [insert system being sold here].

There's no money to be made in telling or using [insert system
being sold here] but the person selling it trying to get as much
return as possible in getting out of the system.

If you want, here's a way to make tons of money that I'll give away

FREE!

There are a few simple steps.

Get a nice computer system set up for graphics work.

Get a nice scanner.

Get a nice color printer.

Scan in paper money of the type you would like to make.

Print said scans on similar type of paper the money normally
comes on.

Live it up like there's no tomorrow until the proper
authorities come and arrest your conterfeiting heinie.

Okay, I never said it was a good or legal way to make
money (this is satire and is information that should not be
used—repeat—this is satire and you should not follow
this advice).

Obligatory Miscellaneous

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go
ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or
entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent
links to that entry only. The format for the links are
simple: Start with the base link for this site: http://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are
interested in, say 2000/08/01,
so that would make the final URL:

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's
intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the
page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in
using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If
you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that
important.

It is assumed that every brand name, slogan, corporate name,
symbol, design element, et cetera mentioned in these pages is a
protected and/or trademarked entity, the sole property of its
owner(s), and acknowledgement of this status is implied.